Friday, 7 February 2014

Sochi, Asylum Seekers and Getting Serious about anti-LGBT Violence

Over twenty
years ago, I lived and worked in Jamaica. As the Sochi Olympics begin and at a time the legal status of LBGT* people around the
world is being highlighted I want to talk about one aspect of my time in Jamaica.

While I worked there I remember being told a story. It was the
story of a young gay teacher’s terrifying experience in the village I worked
in. At the village high school, there had been a procession of us paid
‘volunteer’ teachers from the UK and a few years before my arrival there’d been
a ‘scandal’.

It had been
discovered that a young British man was gay. And, in the story I was told, a
large posse from the surrounding villages – yes the word 'posse' was used – was formed to find
him and ‘tar and feather’ him. He escaped this terrifying ordeal through being smuggled out
of the village to Kingston and thence to be deposited on a plane back to England.

The imagery
– in my febrile imagination – seemed a mix of what I’d read about Ku Klux Klan
practices against African-Americans and something from a Gothic novel. I was a callow and gullible youth. Perhaps it was told to frighten me about how edgy Jamaica was at that time. The
truth is that shocked and scandalized as I was, I could not quite believe the
story. Or did not want to believe it. I still suspect that elements of the tale
were amplified for my ‘titillation’ and – if it was true – it does not take
much wit to realize that there may have been elements of the original story
that had been redacted out.

Nonetheless
this story bears truth. Jamaica in the early ‘90s was – and, indeed, remains –
an unsafe place to be gay, especially a gay man. Violence against gay men has –
notoriously – been inscribed in aspects of Ragga and Reggae music. Readers of
The Pink News and other media will recall that very recently Christian
Concern’s Andrea Minichiello Williams spoke at a
conference In Jamaica was organised in order to lobby against the repeal of the
country’s law banning gay sex.

I do not
write this to ‘bash’ Jamaica. Jamaica like all the post-colonial countries
bears the sins of white ‘father’ figures and culture. The religious and legal instincts of
18th and 19th century imperial ideologies have become so
culturally embedded - despite brilliant post-colonial work - that in some places, notably in Africa, that hatred of
LGBT* people can – at a phenomenological level – be presented as 'natural'. In such a context it is hardly surprising that some folk will wish to legislate against LGBT* people in order to protect 'the good' of society. Yet, as I see it, the
bearers of privilege like Britain bear an ongoing and barely resolved
responsibility for the creation of legislated hatred.

I trust
that very many of us are taking differing kinds of action to both protest
ongoing and emergent hatred against LGBT* people in large swathes of the world. I hope we are trying to hold a rainbow banner up against Sochi to embarrass the likes
of Putin. I am yet to be convinced that there is nothing ‘we’ can do to keep
the struggle alive for people facing the daily threat of murder, torture and
imprisonment in the majority world.

However, organisations
like Stonewall have reported how difficult it has been for lesbian and gay
people to be taken seriously by the UK asylum seeker system. Having lived under
conditions of fear and death it can be especially difficult for LGBT* people
arriving in the UK seeking asylum to articulate their stories. The ongoing
situation faced by Jacqueline Nantumbwe, an LBGT asylum seeker, who faces
deportation back to a state (Uganda) which criminalizes her is only one among many. It is
time that the UK – which bears such a heavy responsibility for creating
contexts of hatred around the world – to take seriously its responsibility
towards the victims of its missionary and imperial adventuring.